Author
Topic: Mash Water / Strike - Beersmith (Read 1831 times)

New to the forums, and trying to understand and get some help on calculating Mash / Strike water. I normally use Beersmith to figure it all out, but as of late its been showing me misinformation with this. Such as looking at my current recipe I am planning its telling me to flysparge with 0 gallons of water and sometimes has showed negative gallons. I think the issue, is that while I do all grain I do not currently have a pot big enough to enable me to do a full boil my pot is 8 gallons, so I have to add top off water at the end to get my needed amount for batch.

Due to this, I want to get a better understanding of calculating these numbers myself. I do 5 gallon batches, and as mentioned have an 8 gallon pot.

Does that mean you do not need to calculate in possible loss on sparge, and if in my case I don't full boil I can say I plan to boil 6-6.5 gallons and add more after.

There should not be any loss on sparge water as your grainbed is already hydrated and your MLT already has it's loss filled by the strike water, so you are correct. You are also correct that you can sparge with as much water as your BK can comfortably hold, and top up either as the boil moves along or at the end in the fermenter (there might be reasons to persuade you one way or the other).

As far as BS not showing accurate information, it's *usually* an issue with your equipment profile and/or mash schedule. The equipment profile is where I think you'll be able to dial things in appropriately for your specific setup. You might post a screenshot of your equipment profile the way you have it setup right now along with a verbal description of how you expect it to work, and the folks here should be able to help you dial that in pretty close. You'll need to use an image hosting website like imgur.com to host your pictures for sharing here since we can upload them directly to the forum (imgur is free and easy, and no registration is needed).

With this, and a recipe I am working on that uses 11.5 lbs of Grains. It is saying to

Mash in 3.59 Gallons of Water then Fly sparge with .94 Gallons. This would get me probably close to 4 Gallons of Wort, it also mentions add water to achieve Boil Volume of 5.66 which is probably about what I can boil in the 8 gallon pot. But would think I would want to sparge with more instead of adding just water before boil.

What's the max wort you can boil? Uncheck calculate boil volume automatically and set it to your max boil volume. Beer smith will then have you mash and sparge run offs add up to that amount.

Boil your wort for 60 minutes and then top off to your batch size. You're efficiency is going to suffer but if you use a consistent process you'll know your efficiency and can adjust your recipes to account for it.

For what it's worth, I brew all grain with an 8 Gallon kettle. With some kettle de-foamer it's really a non issue for almost all 5 gallon batches. Your typical boil volume should only be around 6.25-6.5 gallons assuming a normal boil off rate.

I batch or no sparge. Check out dennybrew.com or brulosophy.com for tips and techiniques for both of these methods respectively.

Use the above suggestions in beersmith and try to break it down in your head to double check it. I.E. if you are making a 5 gallon batch you'll probably be shooting to boil about 6-6.5 gallons. Grains will soak up water during the mash only. Both mash and sparge amounts will be NEAR 4 gallons (8 total with some grain absorption), don't sweat a few quarts in either direction. Beersmith is pretty accurate most of the time. By checking "use equal running", it will try to calculate a thinner mash so that you would end up with roughly 3.25 gallons run-off from the mash and the sparge each to give you your pre-boil of ~6.25 to 6.5 gallons.

DONT GET HUNG UP ON MASH THICKNESS. Shooting for 1.25 or equal running is a good thing to do, but not really necessary, and certainly not worth worrying about. I 've used as low as 1 and WELL over 2 with a no sparge.

QUICK TIP. If your kettle doesn't show volume markings, fill it one gallon at a time and use an old long wooden kitchen spoon or other dip stick and mark at each gallon as you go, up to 7 gallons. This can be used to measure out what you needs for your mash/sparge. That's what I do. As long as the batch is around 10lbs of grain give or take a pound or two, I mash in with 4-5 gallons, and heat up like 5 gallons of sparge water while I wait and put it in a bucket. I then run off into the kettle, and measure with the spoon. If I run off 3 gallons, I know I need 3.5 more to get to 6.5. I then use a pitcher and pull out my 3.5 gallons of sparge water from the bucket and ad it to the mash tun for a batch sparge, the rest gets used for cleaning. Easy peasy.